Remembering Tante Laura

This yahrzeit candle is for my Tante Laura, who died on March 5, 1970—55 years ago. Although we shared only seven years on this earth, her memory is forever etched in my heart.

She gifted me my first Hanukkiyah, so small it uses the thinnest of birthday candles and remains among my treasures.

In the early 1920s, she and one of her sisters, my grandmother, came to this country along with a brother, Max, who had served in the Austrian army. The three worked in the garment industry, saving enough to bring their parents to the Golden Medina. Two decades later, she and Max, neither of whom ever married, lived together in an apartment they rented from Mrs. Provenzano that was located above (or maybe next door to?) Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home Inc. on Second Avenue between Third and Fourth streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Across Second Avenue stands the Church of the Nativity. It got a facelift in the 1970s, but when my mother visited Tante Laura and Uncle Max as a young girl in the late 1930s and 1940s, the building had a Greek Revival edifice. As she told us many times, she loved to watch from Tante Laura's front window as wedding parties left the church on Saturday afternoons to pose for pictures on the front steps—the bride and groom in the middle flanked by groomsmen and taffeta-clad bridesmaids in pastels, two in pink, two in green, two in blue, and two in yellow.

When she was a young woman and Tante Laura wanted to make her a sandwich, my mother would tell her, "Just one slice of bread." But food was love, and although she abided by my mother's wish, she always picked the widest, thickest slice from the middle of the loaf of rye bread.

Later, she told us, when she was a young wife and mother, she'd often return from visiting Tante Laura, to find a cucumber, half a loaf of bread, or $10 stuffed in her purse.

By the time I knew Tante Laura, her hair was gray and held in place with combs. She wore clunky orthopedic shoes and her body was thick. "You can't escape your genes," I often say, and I am convinced I inherited my own body shape from her. I hope I also possess some of her generosity of spirit, love of family, and tenacity. I hope, too, that she knows, even after all these years, how deeply loved and missed she is by her great-nieces and great-nephews.

P.S. When one of those great-nephews went off to college in the 1980s and joined a fraternity, somehow he discovered that the maiden name of one of his fraternity brothers was Provenzano. When my cousin told his mom, my aunt, she off-handedly said, "Ask him if his mother's name is Adrienne." Indeed it is; she is the daughter of Mrs. Provenzano, Tante Laura and Uncle Max's landlord. What are the chances?!